The Pale House (63 page)

The Pale House
features a penal battalion, albeit one with a high percentage of foreign volunteers, or
hilfswiliger
—hiwis. These were men whom the Germans enlisted, or who volunteered, to serve in auxiliary or supplementary functions such as drivers, cooks, medical orderlies, and porters. The word now has an overwhelmingly pejorative nature, especially regarding the tens of thousands of Soviet citizens who served with the Wehrmacht in the USSR.
Hiwi
has almost become synonymous with them, but there were many such people from most of the countries the Germans conquered during the Second World War. Partly as a means of demonstrating the upheavals engendered by war, the novel includes hiwis who were gathered up in the penal battalion's retreat across the Balkans, a collection of Greeks, Serbs, Albanians, and Croats, all of whom had good reasons for not being able to stay on in their own countries after the Germans had gone. Alexiou and his men, for instance, had served in the security battalions formed by the German collaborationist government in Greece and had fought in a bitter civil war in which, like in Yugoslavia, the German occupation had been the trigger that fractured wide a whole range of prewar political cleavages.

The Feldjaegerkorps was created in November 1943, partly as a solution to the perceived inability of the Feldgendarmerie and other existing military police units to maintain desired levels of discipline. The Feldjaegerkorps accepted only officers and noncommissioned officers, and in order to be eligible for service soldiers had to have a minimum of three years front-line combat experience and have earned the Iron Cross Second Class. The authority of the Feldjaegerkorps came directly from the armed forces high command—the
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
—and thus even the lowest-ranking soldier theoretically carried more power than an officer, and their authority extended even to the Waffen SS (the armed branch of the SS).

The Feldjaegerkorps's basic duties included maintaining order and discipline behind the lines, preventing retreats (especially those driven by panic), gathering and organizing stragglers, and rounding up deserters. Their duties, and the harsh environments in which they operated, have given them a mixed reputation. Without doubt, they could be harsh. Drumhead courts-martial and executions were not unknown. However, and despite their extensive powers, there is much evidence that they were far from needlessly brutal and could be tough but fair.

Three Feldjaeger “commands” were created: Commands I and II served on the Eastern Front and were all but destroyed by the end of the war. Command III was formed in Vienna and fought mostly on the Western Front. In an interesting detail of history, Feldjaegerkorps III was the last German unit to formally lay down its arms, in June 1946, with the U.S. occupation forces in Germany using it to help ensure discipline among German prisoners of war. Although there are no records of the Feldjaegerkorps having served in the Balkans, it seemed an ideal opportunity to detach a small unit and send Reinhardt there with them.

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The War Crimes Bureau existed. It was a special section of the legal department of the armed forces high command formed to investigate reports of alleged Allied war crimes for the purposes of lodging diplomatic protests, war crimes trials, and for official government publications (also known as “white books”). The Bureau, including several of its senior staff, were the direct successors of a similar body formed in the Prussian war ministry during World War I. The Treaty of Versailles effectively cast all guilt and blame upon Imperial Germany for crimes committed during the first war, and the feeling was probably strong that the same was not to happen again. Although the Bureau's mandate did not exclude investigating war crimes committed by Germans, the majority of their work was devoted to investigating allegations of war crimes committed against German soldiers and civilians, and the vast majority of what they investigated occurred on the Eastern Front.

By all accounts, the judges who worked in the Bureau were exemplary professionals, largely uncorrupted by Nazism—that indeed the Bureau was something of an environment of opposition to national socialism, with several members executed for their roles in resistance activities—and they carried out their work meticulously and methodically. This does beg the question, however, as to how it was possible—or what mind-set was needed, or what bureaucratic environment had to exist—for these judges to carry out such careful investigations into alleged Allied war crimes in the midst of the staggering levels of official criminality being perpetrated under the Nazi regime? The irony can surely not be lost on us that as the War Crimes Bureau was not competent to investigate any accusations made against the SS, the greatest crime of them all—the Holocaust—passed them by.

—

Two books in particular were invaluable for describing the situation in wartime Sarajevo: Emily Greble's extraordinarily detailed
Sarajevo 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Hitler's Europe
and Robert Donia's
Sarajevo: A Biography
. I am indebted to both authors and to many other sources and books. Alfred-Maurice de Zayas's excellent
The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939–1945
was also of great use in outlining and describing the Wehrmacht's judicial systems. Eric Tobey's excellent
Soldbuch Anatomy
(dererstezug.com/SoldbuchAnatomy1.htm) was invaluable in researching the ways in which the
soldbuchs
were misused by Jansky and his cabal, as was the information on soldbuchweb.com. Any historical inaccuracies are either just those, or the author's attribution of artistic privilege to alter facts, just a little . . .

—

Reinhardt's journey has taken him on a path of renewal and rediscovery, culminating in an act of resistance that he sees as fitting for the times within which he lives. He knows, however, that to come to that acceptance he has had to make accommodation with himself and what he has always thought is right. In siding with the Partisans over the Ustaše, he is conscious of what he has done. Reinhardt's war is not quite over, but more importantly, the peace that is coming will be as challenging as the fighting it ended. Reinhardt still has far to go until he, like so many others, can pretend to live in a time of peace.

Although he may not serve under his country's colors much longer, there is still much to live and fight for. Reinhardt will march again.